What is “text-hip”? In Korea, reading is cool — and adult reading rates just hit a record low

It started with one post from NHK

Scrolling through X today, a post from NHK's international news desk (@nhk_kokusainews) caught my eye.

A reading boom is spreading among young people in Korea. We looked into what is behind it: readers sharing their reading on social media, and book clubs where strangers gather to read together.

The caption on screen read “text-hip: posting your own books and reading moments on social media.” I had heard that reading was becoming a trend in Korea, but I honestly did not know the enthusiasm had lasted this long as a culture — well past the rush that followed the Nobel Prize.

Then, in the replies, someone wrote: “I was shocked at how low the adult reading rate is.” Curious, I dug into recent Korean reporting and the latest statistics. What I found was not the simple feel-good story of “young people suddenly started reading.” It was a more real, and more urgent, picture of where reading culture stands right now.

What “text-hip” means

The word is said to have come out of idol fandom. Context from abroad flowed in too, such as the American model Kaia Gerber's early-2024 remark that “reading is so sexy.” A global mood — reading as intelligent, sexy, cool — was already the ground it grew in.

The key point is that text-hip covers not just reading but showing yourself reading. The behaviour around the book, more than the book itself, became the culture. That distinction is the key to the mismatch with the reading statistics we will get to below.

Three sparks that lit the boom

1. K-pop idols and their “airport books”Jang Wonyoung of IVE and Huh Yunjin of LE SSERAFIM, among others, spoke openly about loving books and recommended titles such as Mieko Kawakami's “Breasts and Eggs” and a collection of the Buddha's words by the Japanese monk Ryunosuke Koike. The books they carried through Incheon Airport became “airport books,” and the media ran with it. Fans read what their idols read; the heat of fandom flowed straight into bookshops.
2. Han Kang's Nobel Prize in Literature (October 2024)The decisive moment was Han Kang's Nobel Prize. “The Vegetarian” and “Human Acts” passed one million copies sold within six days of the announcement. In a market that publishes more than 60,000 titles a year, a million-seller appears perhaps once a year. Print book sales jumped 80% compared with the six days before — an explosion the publishing world had never seen.
3. Social media as a place to be seenAnd there was somewhere to share all of it: reading accounts on Instagram and Threads. Covers, bookmarks, notebooks, bookshop shelves. Reading changed from an activity that ended with you into an experience you could post. The word text-hip stuck because this place to put it existed.

The energy did not stay a passing fuss. It settled into concrete habits among young people.

A reading culture that became habits

• Pilsa — copying out books by handIn Seoul's independent bookshops it is now an ordinary weeknight sight: people in their twenties gathering to spend an hour silently copying a passage from a novel into a notebook by hand. Pilsa began as an exam-study technique; it has become a modern culture of favourite notebooks and fountain pens laid out and posted to Instagram. Sales of pilsa books rose roughly sevenfold year on year (up 692.8%).
• Book-hopping — bookshop and library toursReading trips grew popular: touring the independent bookshops of Gunsan, or Jeonju's Yeonhwajeong Library and the Haksan Forest Poetry Library. They became content the national tourism organisation itself promotes.
• A surge in reading goodsOn the shopping app ZIGZAG, searches for book covers rose 28-fold. “Reading customisation” — dressing a book with paperweights, book perfumes and bookmarks — became a thing.
• Event feverMore than 150,000 people crowded into the Seoul International Book Fair, 70% of them in their twenties and thirties. A “Minumsa bun,” a collaboration between the publisher Minumsa and the convenience store GS25, sold 50,000 in three days, and a 3,000-won item was resold on flea-market apps for 15,000 won.

Taken on its own, this looks like a remarkable, sustained reading boom among Korea's young.

Meanwhile, the adult reading rate fell to a record-low 38.5%

But the numbers in the 2025 National Reading Survey, published in March 2026 by Korea's Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, show the opposite reality.

Overall adult reading rate

38.5%

The lowest since the survey began in 1994

Books read per adult per year

2.4 books

Just 18.2 minutes of reading on a weekday

Adults who read no book at all in a year

Over 60%

The other face of the rate: readers and non-readers are pulling apart

Only the reading rate of people in their twenties edged up, to 75.3% (+0.8 points) — but it was already 74.5% in 2023. In other words, it is not that young people who never read all picked up books at once. Closer to the truth: the people who were already reading became visible, and easy to consume as a culture.

What the boom moved was not the number of readers but the heat around books. That reading of it lines up with the criticism at home.

The cooler view in the Korean press

Korean media have been far from uniformly warm about the boom.

Isn't it a show of “isseobility” — the knack of looking like you have taste — for social media?

The book fair has become a trade show for buying limited-edition merchandise, not books.

While everyone talks of a boom, closures and suspensions of independent bookshops have passed 250 in total; the neighbourhood bookshop keeps disappearing.

The criticism is understandable. It is hard to deny that what grew was not the number of people reading books but the number of people consuming around them.

Why it still can't be dismissed as vanity

And yet, writing all of this off as vanity or a consumer trend does not feel right either.

People worn out by the stimulation of short video, suffocated by a daily life that demands efficiency at every turn, are reaching for the feel of paper and for quiet — the same way they reach for vinyl records or a film camera. That instinct is an honest one.

Nor is this only Korea's story. In Japan, the Agency for Cultural Affairs' 2023 survey on the national language found that 62.6% of people read no book in a typical month, up sharply from 47.3% five years earlier. The scales differ, but the picture is almost the same as Korea's “over 60% read nothing in a year.”

Look wider and there is Silent Book Club, born in San Francisco in 2012, where people gather to read their own books in silence; it has spread across countries, and quiet, no-talking book clubs are slowly growing in Japan too. Fewer people read, yet places to read quietly with others are multiplying. That contradiction, I think, sits close to the heart of text-hip.

Time alone, and the presence of someone else

Reading time is, in the end, thoroughly personal. Nobody can understand a line on your behalf; you follow the words in your own head and let your thoughts move at your own pace. It is a solitary, deeply private act.

But sitting alone at a desk, your hand drifts to your phone, or the noise of the day pulls your attention away. Even with the wish to read, keeping the silence going on willpower alone is surprisingly hard in the world we live in.

That is when something like the book club in NHK's footage helps: the mere presence of strangers quietly turning pages in the same space somehow brings you back to your own reading. No conversation, nothing imposed. Simply the fact that someone is there becomes quiet support for the time you personally wanted to spend.

I'm building a reading space with quiet presence in it

I love the time I spend reading, and I wanted a place where that quiet presence could be felt — so I am building a small web service called mekuru.

There is no lively socialising and nothing like a social feed: just avatars sitting in the same room with their books open. A reading space for paper books. No video, no microphone, no chat. What reaches you is the occasional sound of a page turning and the sense that someone is there. The time you spent with your book is quietly recorded.

Time with a book belongs to you alone. Still, now and then, I hope more of us can borrow a little of someone else's page-turning presence and slowly enjoy the book in our hands.